ABSTRACT
This work focuses on the effect that the design and construction of the “Amoreiras Complex” had on Portuguese life up to the present day.
It stimulates understanding of what was seen as a provocative rupture, displayed in a metaphorical building that transposed the Portuguese ideology of the time, as a sign and configuration of postmodern architecture in Portugal, through an extraordinary ideological transformation translated by “consumerism,” metamorphosed in that architectural exuberance to the present day. The most curious thing is that all this came about through the idea of its architect – between the program and the challenging aesthetics, nothing was conventional.
From its construction to the present day, the creation of a large building and the consequent concepts transposed into an “integrated building” and a “Shopping Center” underwent an immense proliferation, reconfiguring not only the urban organization of the metropolis but the suburbs and the country. Nothing was the same from then on, and this building was not the main one responsible for this phenomenon.
This paper also has the particularity of speaking in the first person with its creator – the architect Tomás Taveira, the leading figure of postmodern aesthetics in Portuguese architecture. Several excerpts from that conversation have been added to this work, enriching and helping the understanding of what was promulgated as the spirit of a time.
